Les Clefs De Bagnole (Car Keys)
A rather strange edition to Tartan’s Cine Lumiere collection, this pleasant enough film positions itself somewhere between a documentary and a fiction film. In fact, it does so in such a unique way that I am not quite sure how to classify it.
It starts off with the director and star Laurent Baffie pitching his idea to some French Directors and Producers, including Claude Berri....
A rather strange edition to Tartan’s Cine Lumiere collection, this pleasant enough film positions itself somewhere between a documentary and a fiction film. In fact, it does so in such a unique way that I am not quite sure how to classify it.
It starts off with the director and star Laurent Baffie pitching his idea to some French Directors and Producers, including Claude Berri and Alain Sarde, to see if they will help back this film project. Baffie’s idea is that his main character will lose his car keys (which is the translation of the French title) and ultimately find them, after the long film journey, in his other pocket which he had initially forgot to check. After being told his project is a lot of cack, he continues to try and find a big name French actor to play the lead, so it will be easier to get funding for this film. Everyone from Yvan Attal, to Eric Cantona, to Daniel Auteuil is propositioned but the answer remains the same…get real. However, the tone of the film is set and in the following scene we hit the scene where Baffie does indeed lose his keys. Although still masquerading as a documentary, the interlinking of ideas and the continual explanation of what is happening does provide a quite bizarre blend.
Certain scenes are clearly influenced by the surrealists, such as the door in Baffie’s central Paris apartment that opens up onto the beach, and his toilet that looks like it is filmed in an underwater Aqaurium somewhere. These kind of devices open up so many directions to go that one minute we are in a French country house and the next we are in a grape plantation in the middle of Columbia, or something like that. Anyway, Baffie teams up with actor Daniel Russo, who is also playing himself and they duck and dive all manner of situations to try and find the missing car keys.
The film uses many clever devices and uses logic and styles from much of the traditional media. Whenever a certain questioned is posed, such as “What do you think of friendly holdups? the film then cuts in actual documentary footage of normal people being asked the question (like on the local news channels in the UK, when the journalist is ‘out and about’ amongst the riff-raff…sorry, us). These questions persist throughout the film and are actually rather amusing sequences in there own way. The 2 main characters discuss amongst other things, when the other one will get their big sex scene, what kind of things they should include in the film to make it a commercial success (a question posed in a bar to anyone listening), the style they should use and what twists the script should take to make the film less boring, such as Gerard Depardieu turning up as a cheese store owner.
Like with any film that is a constant wall of jokes, a couple do stand out. Upon entering a posh restaurant and being served up the usual display of gourmet food that these holes sell, they decide to blend all the courses in their meal together and reduce it to what can be best described as a ‘smoothie’. No punchline I’m afraid but it is a funny idea. The other funny idea is when they try to buy a dog that has been specially trained to sniff out and find car keys. The shop also trains dog to sniff out all kinds of things, including one that ‘sniffs out twats’, to which it appears and starts barking at Baffie.
I am aware that this film sounds naff on paper but it certainly never gets boring, the ideas are fresh enough and the overall bizarre mix of the film keeps the attention focused. It says a lot about the current state of French and world cinema, and as it is a film dressed up as a documentary, that clearly presents itself as a film (confused yet?), it has the scope to be both a satirical movie and a pretty down to earth presentation about the magic and ridiculousness of movies as a whole.
The DVD presentation is again excellent, coming in DTS and Dolby 5.1 and Stereo, with the picture being in Anamorphic 2.35:1. The width of the frame allows for many jokes to take place on the outskirts of the movie, as well as the picture itself being as good as crystal clear as you can get. As there is a lot of playing around with the image the sound is also employed to support that, so the full scope of the speakers is used cleverly in some places. However this is no atmosphere drenched FILM, it is a MOVIE and nothing more, so the choice of sound is pretty irrelevant really. Unfortunately or fortunately, this film didn’t have any extras at all. To be honest that was a blessing in disguise because although this film is not a document of the filming process, the sheer chaos of the whole thing is probably best left unexplained, one for people to ponder and then move on
All in all, virtually impossible to classify, this is a good laugh at best. It is pretty harmless, yet occasionally illuminating and thought provoking. Baffie apparently works on French TV and this has clearly allowed him access to some of the France’s greatest current actors, a fact demonstrated by the fact that this film has probably the biggest cast of A list actors than any other film in history, even though most of them are onscreen for less than 5 seconds But it is not one to take seriously, as is summed up by one scene towards the end of the film when the film’s Producer steps into the back of a car, during a moving car sequence, and announces to Baffie that the film is running out of money. Baffie asks him why and the Producer replies “You get stoned every night and keep having too many new ideas”. I think that sums it up about as well as I could. Definitely worth a watch but not an essential.
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